1. Technical Field
The present invention is directed to a system and method of accessing services, such as digital services and, more specifically, to a system and method of facilitating multi-modal access to services preferred by a user.
2. Art Background
Wireless devices are widely employed by people to access the growing number of available digital services. Such access typically entails the utilization of a menu structure to enable a wireless user to identify the service of interest to be accessed. This is often a slow and cumbersome process. There are also well-known methods for a user to explicitly select short-cuts, i.e., “bookmarks”, to their preferred services to facilitate quicker access. However, creation of such short-cuts requires significant effort on the part of the user, and organizing and accessing the short-cuts can be difficult in digital devices with limited user interfaces (UI).
Moreover, in some situations, e.g. while driving a car, a user will be engaged in an activity which limits his or her ability to operate manually the digital device. In such situations, it would be desirable for the user to have alternative means by which to access services through the device, such as through voice command. However, speech recognition capability of existing technology suitable for wireless devices is limited in terms of different words a speech recognition engine can reliably identify. With the large number of different digital services now available to wireless users, it is not feasible to reliably recognize a voice command to access what amounts to be a practically unlimited set of services.
For example, in the case of (mobile) internet services (e.g., wml, html, xhtml pages) the amount of accessible services is almost unlimited. This means that it is generally not feasible to store the names of all the available services in mobile terminals or in a centralized server. The mobile terminals simply do not have sufficient storage capacity. On the server side the storage capacity may not be a problem but it is not plausible that all (mobile) Internet services would register their names in a centralized server. Even if all the services were registered, it would be very difficult for the user to uniquely indicate which service is requested.
For example, if the user provides a voice command, “Yahoo news”, it would be impossible for the centralized server to know which service is requested since the well known service site Yahoo provides news in many countries. Furthermore, knowing the language is not enough since Yahoo provides different news services for the different English speaking countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and so forth. Concerning the United States, Yahoo further provides different services for different U.S. cities.